Wrapping Up Cowboy Poetry Week

Wrapping Up Cowboy Poetry Week

Wrapping Up Cowboy Poetry Week. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

This week was National Cowboy Poetry week and we wrap up our series with Rodney Nelson, a small rancher in North Dakota. Growing up his mother was fond of poetry and always had a poem for any occasion.

NELSON: I think it was just natural for me to write something. I would probably do it for fun, send someone a poem instead of a letter. Never got very serious about it until the cowboy poetry movement across the western United States started.

Nelson passed on an opportunity early on but opportunity knocked again.

NELSON: And on the strength of one old poem I wrote years ago they came to me again and started performing at the North Dakota Cowboy Poetry Gathering in 1987 and it became part of my life. I think the honesty of the whole cowboy poetry thing is what people like and it reflects the views and probably opinions of genuine rural people.

And Nelson says that everyone has a different view of what a cowboy is.

NELSON: To some people a cowboy is a rodeo cowboy. To others he may be a horse show guy. To others he’s a rancher. To others he may be a horseman. To somebody else he may be just a person who handles a lot of cattle and to some people he may be fellow who appreciates western music and does a lot of line dancing.

Regardless there is something very refreshing about cowboy poetry. Visit cowboypoetry.com to find Nelson and many other fine poets.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. 

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